Awakening from Nihilism:
The Templeton Prize Address

Michael Novak

This essay is adapted from an address presented by Mr. Novak at Westminster
Abbey on May 5, 1994. He is the twenty-fourth recipient of The Templeton
Prize for Progress in Religion.

As we draw near the close of the twentieth century, we
owe ourselves a reckoning.

This century was history's bloodiest. From this revered and mortally
threatened Abbey some fifty years ago, one could hear the screech of falling
bombs. At a time they didn't choose, and in a way they didn't foresee,
more than a hundred million persons in Europe found their lives brutally
taken from them. An earlier Templeton laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
has agreed that, beyond the war dead, 66 million prisoners perished in
the Soviet labor camps. Add the scores of millions dead in Asia, Africa,
and the other continents since 1900.

Nor is there any guarantee that the twenty-first century will not be
bloodier.

And yet the world has drawn four painful lessons from the ashes of our
century. First, even under conditions of nihilism, better than cowardice
is fidelity to truth. From fidelity to truth, inner liberty is wrested.

Second, the boast of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler that dictatorship
is more vigorous than "decadent democracy" was empty. It led
to concentration camps.

Third, the claim that socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and
better for the poor, was also empty. It paved the road to serfdom.

Fourth, vulgar relativism, now widely ascendant, undermines the culture
of liberty. If it triumphs, free institutions may not survive the twenty-first
century.

For three centuries, modernity has been supremely fruitful in its practical
discoveries-in, for example, its magnificent institutions of political
and economic liberty. But it has been spectacularly wrong in its underlying
philosophy of life. An age wrong about God is almost certain to be wrong
about man.

History, Hegel once remarked, is a butcher's bench. Homo homini lupus.
Many sober inquirers, seeing how prodigally in this century the bodies
of individuals have been thrown around like sacks of bones, understandably
asserted that God is dead.

And yet, in this dark night of a century, a first fundamental lesson
was drawn from the bowels of nihilism itself: Truth matters. Even
for those unsure whether there is a God, a truth is different from a lie.
Torturers can twist your mind, even reduce you to a vegetable, but as long
as you retain the ability to say "Yes" or "No" as truth
alone commands, they cannot own you.

Further, as the prison literature of the twentieth century-a very large
literature, alas-abundantly testifies, truth is not simply a pragmatic
compromise, although torturers try seductively to present it so. "It
is such a little thing," they say. "All you have to do is say
'yes,' sign here, and this will all be over. Then you can forget about
it. What harm will come of it? We have been in power for seventy years,
we will always be in power. Be reasonable. Accept reality. It is such a
little thing. Who will ever know? Just sign and be done with it."

Yet millions have known in such circumstances that their identity as
free women and free men was at stake; more exactly, their salvation. Irina
Ratushinskaya, Raoul Wallenberg, Andrei Sakharov, Maxi milian Kolbe, Vladimir
Bukovsky, Vaclav Havel, Anatoly Sharansky, Pavel Bratinka, Tomas Halik,
Mihailo Mihailov-let us summon up the witnesses, the endless scroll of
honor of our century.

To obey truth is to be free, and in certain extremities nothing is more
clear to the tormented mind, nothing more vital to the survival of self-
respect, nothing so important to one's sense of remaining a worthy human
being-of being no one's cog, part of no one's machine, resister to death
against the kingdom of lies. In fidelity to truth lies human dignity.

There is nothing recondite in this. Simple people have often seen it
more clearly than have the clerisy. This is the plain insight that Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn expressed when he wrote in his 1970 Nobel Address that one
single truth is more powerful than all the weapons in the world, and that,
dark as that hour then seemed in the world, with communism everywhere advancing,
truth would prevail against the lie; and that those who clung to truth
would overturn tyranny. (He was correct in his prediction. Truth did prevail
over arms-we are witnesses to history; it is our obligation to teach this
to our children.)

What those learned who suffered in prison in our time-what Dostoevsky
learned in prison in the Tsar's time-is that we human beings do not own
the truth. Truth is not "merely subjective," not something we
make up, or choose, or cut to today's fashions or the morrow's pragmatism-we
obey the truth. We do not "have" the truth, truth owns
us, truth possesses us. Truth is far larger and deeper than we are. Truth
leads us where it will. It is not ours for mastering.

And yet, even in prison, truth is a master before whom a free man stands
erect. In obeying the evidence of truth, no human being is humiliated-
rather, he is in that way alone ennobled. In obeying truth, we find the
way of liberty marked out "as a lamp unto our feet." In obeying
truth, a man becomes aware of participating in something greater than himself,
which measures his inadequacies and weaknesses.

Truth is the light of God within us. For us its humble mode is inquiry,
seeking, restlessness. Innermost at the core of us, even as children, is
an irrepressible drive to ask questions. That unlimited drive is God's
dynamic presence in us, the seed of our dissatisfaction with everything
less than the infinite.

The Grand Refusal of the modern age to say "yes" to God is
based upon a failure both of intellect and of imagination. Modernity's
mistake is to have imagined God as if He were different from truth, alien
from ourselves, "out there," like a ghostly object far in space,
to serve Whom is to lose our own autonomy. Modernity has imagined God to
be a ghostly version of the tyrants we have actually seen in the twentieth
century. It took the real tyrants of our time, jackbooted, arrogant, enjoying
the torture of innocents, to shatter that false identity. The tyrants may
have thought they were like God; it was idiotic to flatter them that God
was like them.

Many who resisted the tyrants of our era turned nihilism inside out.
In the nothingness they found inner light. Many came to call the light
they found there God. The relation some gradually assumed toward this inner
light, whose Source, they knew, was not themselves, was that of wordless
conversation or communion. They addressed their God in conversation, under
the name of Truth. In the twentieth century, prisons and torture chambers
have often been better places to encounter God than universities.

Until recently, then, modernity was mistaken in its relation to truth,
and thus to God and humankind. But even so modernity has, to its great
credit, by grant of Providence, made three great institutional discoveries.
Modern thinkers first worked out, as neither the ancients nor the medievals
had, the practical principles of the three-fold free society: free in its
polity, free in its economy, and free in the realm of conscience and inquiry.
The great modern achievements in these matters have been supremely practical:
How to make free institutions work at least tolerably well, and better
in most ways than earlier regimes.

However, despite these happy practical gains, modernity tore down the
only philosophical foundations that can sustain the free society. The Age
of Enlightenment was supposed to do away with sectarian bickering, but
it did not. If you stay within your own school of thought, the foundations
of the free society may seem secure. Peek outside, however, and you will
hear raucous voices shouting. The Age of Enlightenment has failed to secure
a mode of public moral argument worthy of the institutions it has erected.

Lest we forget: The twentieth century has been not only the bloodiest
but also the most ideological of centuries. Ideology is the atheist's substitute
for faith, and, lacking faith, our age did not want for warring ideologies.
For nine decades of this century, armies not exactly ignorant clashed by
night. Beneath the fearful din, two great practical principles of the free
society were mortally contested: first, the political principle;
second, the economic principle.

Despite the slogans of the 1930s ("the End of an Era," "the
Decline of the West") and despite the boasts of dictators ("In
three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken"), decadent
democracies proved they had the will, the audacity, and the stamina to
defeat the principle of dictatorship. They defeated it so decisively that
today hardly a dictator anywhere-too many, unfortunately, remain-dares
to argue that dictatorship is an ideal form of government. Most are left
to argue limply that, in the particular case of their own countries, dictatorship
is expedient. They lie.

Even for desperately poor people, the principles of democracy (the rule
of law, limited government, checks and balances) are better than dictatorship.
Only thus can people enjoy the zone of civil liberty necessary to ensure
their dignity and self-command. Democracy is the world's first great practical
lesson of our time, learned at fearful cost.

The second great practical lesson of our century is the futility of
socialism as an economic principle. For 150 years, the battle over
fundamental economic principles was conducted asymmetrically. Hundreds
of books detailed the wonders of socialism as an ideology, passionately
dissected the flaws of capitalist practice, and boastfully mapped out the
coming transition from capitalism to socialism. Not one single book existed-when
the time finally came-to map out the one necessary transition, from socialism
to capitalism. I doubt whether ever in history were so many intellectuals
wrong on a matter to which they themselves assigned highest moment, all
the while thinking of themselves as "scientific" and disinterested.
The story of how this happened must one day be recounted.

As Pope John Paul II pointed out in Centesimus Annus, this story
is connected to the intellectual's devaluation of the human person. No
system that devalues the initiative and creativity of every woman and every
man, made in the image of their Creator, is fit for human habitation. On
the first day that the flag of Russia snapped against the blue sky over
the city hall of St. Petersburg, where for seven decades the Red flag had
flown, a Russian artist told me: "The next time you want to try an
experiment like socialism, try it out on animals first-men it hurts too
much."

Indeed, once the Iron Curtain was joyfully torn down, and the Great
Lie thoroughly unmasked, it became clear that in the heartland of "real
existing socialism" the poor were living in Third World conditions;
that a large majority of the population was in misery; that both the will
to work and economic creativity had been suffocated; that economic intelligence
had been blinded by the absurd necessity to set arbitrarily the prices
of some tens of millions of commodities and services; that the omnivorous
State had almost wholly swallowed civil society; that the society of "comrades"
had in fact driven an untold number of people into the most thoroughly
privatized, untrusting, and alienated inner isolation on earth; that this
Culture of the Lie had been hated by scores of millions; and that the soils
of vast stretches of the land and the waters of rivers and lakes had been
despoiled.

Three great lessons have been learned from our century, then, even if
the cost of learning them was fearful beyond measure. First, truth matters.
Second, for all its manifest faults, even absurdities, democracy is better
for the protection of individuals and minorities than dictatorship. Third,
for all its deficiencies, even gaping inadequacies, capitalism is better
for the poor than either of its two great rivals, socialism and the traditional
Third World economy. Just watch in which direction the poor of the world
invariably migrate. The poor-of whom my family in living memory was one-know
better than the intellectuals. They seek opportunity and liberty. They
seek systems that allow them to be economically creative, as God made them
to be.

From these three lessons, one might derive reasons for hope: Quite possibly-if
along that great plain that runs like an arrow eastward from Germany through
Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian steppes, the new experiments
in democracy and capitalism succeed-the twenty-first century could be the
most prosperous and free in the history of the world. Perhaps China, too,
if it becomes a democracy under the rule of law as it is already becoming
capitalist, will bring to its more than one billion citizens unprecedented
liberty. And throughout Latin America, there is a chance that the fertile
soil of liberty will yield new fruits of education, creative energy, and
prosperity for all.

Indeed, the twenty-first century could be the single most creative century
in history, bringing virtually all the peoples of the world under the cool
and healthful shade of liberty. It could be lovely.

Far likelier, however, is the prospect that the twenty-first century
will be like the twentieth: tormented, sanguinary, barbarous. For there
is still, alas, a fourth lesson.

During the twentieth century, the free society was fighting for its
life. The urgent need to secure the free polity and the free economy blinded
most to the cultural peril into which liberty has rapidly been falling.

Many sophisticated people love to say that they are cynical, that ours
is a cynical age. They flatter themselves: They do not believe nothing;
they believe anything. Ours is not an age of unbelief. It is an age of
arrogant gullibility. Think how many actually believed the romances of
fascism and communism. Think how many, today, believe in Global Warming;
think how many believe in a coming Ice Age-and think how many believe in
both! One thing our intellectual betters never lack is passionate belief.

One principle that today's intellectuals most passionately disseminate
is vulgar relativism, "nihilism with a happy face." For them,
it is certain that there is no truth, only opinion: my opinion,
your opinion. They abandon the defense of intellect. There being
no purchase of intellect upon reality, nothing else is left but preference,
and will is everything. They retreat to the romance of will.

But this is to give to Mussolini and Hitler, posthumously and casually,
what they could not vindicate by the most willful force of arms. It is
to miss the first great lesson rescued from the ashes of World War II:
Those who surrender the domain of intellect make straight the road of fascism.
Totalitarianism, as Mussolini defined it, is la feroce volanta.
It is the will-to-power, unchecked by any regard for truth. To surrender
the claims of truth upon humans is to surrender Earth to thugs. It is to
make a mockery of those who endured agonies for truth at the hands of torturers.

Vulgar relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now
polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central
nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free
society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the
poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism.

Freedom cannot grow-it cannot even survive-in every atmosphere or clime.
In the wearying journey of human history, free societies have been astonishingly
rare. The ecology of liberty is more fragile than the biosphere of Earth.
Freedom needs clean and healthful habits, sound families, common decencies,
and the unafraid respect of one human for another. Freedom needs entire
rainforests of little acts of virtue, tangled loyalties, fierce loves,
undying commitments. Freedom needs particular institutions and these, in
turn, need peoples of particular habits of the heart.

Consider this. There are two types of liberty: one precritical, emotive,
whimsical, proper to children; the other critical, sober, deliberate, responsible,
proper to adults. Alexis de Tocqueville called attention to this alternative
early in Democracy in America, and at Cambridge Lord Acton put it
this way: Liberty is not the freedom to do what you wish; it is the freedom
to do what you ought. Human beings are the only creatures on earth that
do not blindly obey the laws of their nature, by instinct, but are free
to choose to obey them with a loving will. Only humans enjoy the liberty
to do-or not to do-what we ought to do.

It is this second kind of liberty-critical, adult liberty-that lies
at the living core of the free society. It is the liberty of self-command,
a mastery over one's own passions, bigotry, ignorance, and self-deceit.
It is the liberty of self-government in one's own personal life. For how,
James Madison once asked, can a people incapable of self-government in
private life prove capable of it in public? If they cannot practice self-government
over their private passions, how will they practice it over the institutions
of the Republic?

There cannot be a free society among citizens who habitually lie, who
malinger, who cheat, who do not meet their responsibilities, who cannot
be counted on, who shirk difficulties, who flout the law-or who prefer
to live as serfs or slaves, content in their dependency, so long as they
are fed and entertained.

Freedom requires the exercise of conscience; it requires the practice
of those virtues that, as Winston Churchill noted in his wartime speeches
to the Commons, have long been practiced in these Isles: dutiful stout
arms, ready hearts, courage, courtesy, ingenuity, respect for individual
choice, a patient regard for hearing evidence on both sides of the story.

During the past hundred years, the question for those who loved liberty
was whether, relying on the virtues of our peoples, we could survive powerful
assaults from without (as, in the Battle of Britain, this city nobly did).
During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty
is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from
within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance
the work of the Father of Lies. "There is no such thing as truth,"
they teach even the little ones. "Truth is bondage. Believe what seems
right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow
your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with yourself. Do what feels
comfortable." Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the
twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants.

You are, no doubt, familiar with the objection to this warning. Its
central argument goes like this: to accept the idea of moral truth is to
accept authoritarian control. But between moral relativism and political
control there is a third alternative, well known to the common sense of
the English-speaking peoples. It is called self-control. We do not want
a government that coerces the free consciences of individuals; on the contrary,
we want self-governing individuals to restrain immoral government. We want
self-government, self-command, self-control.

If a people composed of 100 million citizens is guarded by 100 million
inner policemen-that is, by 100 million self-governing consciences-then
the number of policemen on its streets may be few. For a society without
inner policemen, on the other hand, there aren't enough policemen in the
world to make society civil. Self-control is not authoritarianism but rather
the alternative to it.

"The Revolution," Charles Peguy once wrote, "is moral,
or not at all." This is also the law for the free society. It will
deepen its moral culture-or it will die. As human lungs need air, so does
liberty need virtue. The deepest and most vital struggles of the twenty-first
century will be cultural arguments over the sorts of habits necessary to
the preservation of liberty. What are the habits we must teach our young?
Which are the habits we must encourage in ourselves, and which discourage?
To allow liberty to survive-and, more than that, to make it worth all the
blood and tears expended to achieve it-how do we need to live?

With the ample wealth produced by a free economy, with private liberties
bestowed abundantly by free polities, are we not now ashamed of the culture
we have wrought, its shocking crimes, its loss of virtue, its loss of courtesy,
the decline of common decency? Can all the sufferings of our ancestors
on behalf of liberty have been endured for this-that we might be as we
now are?

Nihilism builds no cities. Great cultures are built by vaulting aspiration-by
the Eros of truth and love and justice and realism that flung into the
sky such arches as this Abbey's.

We must learn again how to teach the virtues of the noble Greeks and
Romans, the commandments God entrusted to the Hebrews, and the virtues
that Jesus introduced into the world-even into secular consciences-such
as gentleness, kindness, compassion, and the equality of all in our Father's
love. We must celebrate again the heroes, great and humble, who have for
centuries exemplified the virtues proper to our individual peoples. We
must learn again how to speak of virtue, character, and nobility of soul.

Liberty itself requires unprecedented virtues, rarely seen in simpler
and more simply led societies. Special virtues are needed by self- governing
peoples: calm, deliberate, dispassionate reflection; careful, responsible,
consequence-accepting choice. In self-government, citizens are sovereigns,
and must learn to exercise the virtues of sovereigns.

The free economy, too, demands more virtues than socialist or traditional
economies: It demands active persons, self-starters, women and men of enterprise
and risk. It requires the willingness to sacrifice present pleasures for
rewards that will be enjoyed primarily by future generations. It requires
vision, discovery, invention. Its dynamism is human creativity endowed
in us by our Creator, Who made us in His image.

And so, too, the pluralist society calls for higher levels of civility,
tolerance, and reasoned public argument than citizens in simpler times
ever needed.

To maintain free societies in any of their three parts-economic, political,
or cultural-is a constant struggle. Of these three, the cultural struggle,
long neglected, is the one on whose outcome the fate of free societies
in the twenty-first century will most depend. We will have to learn, once
again, how to think about such matters, and how to argue about them publicly,
with civility, and also with the moral seriousness of those who know that
the survival of liberty depends upon the outcome. The free society is moral,
or not at all.

No one ever promised us that free societies will endure forever. Indeed,
a cold view of history shows that submission to tyranny is the more frequent
condition of the human race, and that free societies have been few in number
and not often long-lived. Free societies such as our own, which have arisen
rather late in the long evolution of the human race, may pass across the
darkness of time like splendid little comets, burn into ashes, disappear.

Yet nothing in the entire universe, vast as it is, is as beautiful as
the human person. The human person alone is shaped to the image of God.
This God loves humans with a love most powerful. It is this God who draws
us, erect and free, toward Himself, this God Who, in Dante's words, is
"the Love that moves the sun and all the stars."